Posted on 11 Feb, 2009 -
Trusting your instincts
* Why we should often trust our initial reactions and snap first decisions more
* The No. 1 trait that tells you whether or not any marriage will last
* What to do next time you see a short man in a suit
When a concert violinist stands up and plays Bach’s Ciaccona in front of a silently waiting audience, is the kind of intelligence that he is using a conscious or an unconscious one?
How about when 30 speed daters in a room all make almost instant judgments about whether or not their partner would be a good potential mate or not?
You would probably answer that this kind of intelligence must be partly if not wholly unconscious. Yet the interesting thing is that if you ask most of us whether we should make important decisions with a snap judgment or after a lengthy, deliberate and conscious deliberation, we would probably say the latter.
Yes, Wendy has been reading books again - this time Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’. Although I should probably say ‘skim read’ here for while Gladwell does pick up on some very good recent scientific findings and opens up some interesting questions, he does tend to give the impression of making more sense than he actually does. His books also tend to come up with a far less succinct or useful theory than they pretend to.
Do we actually really understand how we do most of what we do - or how we even think?
The main scientific idea in this book is that we have two different kinds of thinking: conscious and unconscious (although one point I feel he fails to make is that surely most of what we do is a mixture of the two?). ‘Conscious thinking’ is the kind of thinking you do when you sit down and spend time looking at all the pros and cons of a certain situation and come to a well thought-out decision, for example.
‘Unconscious thinking’ is the kind of thinking that enables you to drive a car without really thinking about it or accurately whack the ball while you’re playing tennis. It’s also the kind of thinking that enables you to decide in the blink of an eye (’Blink’ is the name of Gladwell’s book remember) whether the man who’s just walked into the room would make a good partner, a good manager or the ideal tutor for your son’s seventh year at primary school.
Our unconscious minds aren’t just the wild land of suppressed thoughts Freud told us they were
So which one is better?
Well, the surprising thing (or at least Gladwell hopes you’ll find it surprising) is that - although we tend to trust a decision to be right more if it has been consciously thought out at length with rational arguments - often our initial, instant, ‘gut’ first reaction or decision is actually the better one.
Far from being a land of wild imagination and suppressed sexual yearnings only (sorry Freud), it turns out that our unconscious mind works like a very efficient computer: storing and analysing thousands of pieces of information it has collected over our lifetime to come up with well-computed judgments or actions in seconds.
Trusting in our amazing unconscious ability to judge by ‘essences’?
I remember, for example, once reading about a famous concert violinist who lost the ability to play when he started thinking too consciously about the process of playing. Or how about this nice quotation from the ornithologist David Sibley quoted in Gladwell’s book about how each bird has a certain essence or “giss” by which a highly experienced bird-watcher will be able to identify it in seconds:
“Most of bird identification is based on sort of subjective impression - the way a bird moves and little instantaneous appearances at different angles and sequences of different appearances, and as it turns its head and as it flies and as it turns around, you see sequences of different shapes and angles… All that combines to create a unique impression of a bird that can’t really be taken apart and described in words.”
That is unconscious thinking. Or, if you’d prefer a more scientific description of it, here’s a wonderful explanatory example from Gladwell’s very example-rich book…
The No. 1 trait that tells you whether or not any marriage will last
In the University of Washington, apparently, there is a professor of psychology called John Gottman who can tell within minutes of meeting a couple whether their relationship will last - with an incredible 95% accuracy.
How? Not because he has a sixth sense. But because, having closely examined, filmed and analysed thousands and thousands of couples over several decades, he has gathered the kind of information and accurate scientific conclusions that enable him to make the kind of unconscious super-intelligence judgments that we make every day.
After years of study he can find out everything he needs to know to make his assessment with what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism and contempt. In fact, even within those four, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: CONTEMPT.
Apart from the obvious interesting conclusion about contempt here, the point is that the process that Gottman has gone through over the years to enable him to make these amazingly accurate judgments is the same process that our unconscious mind is doing all the time.
When we make a snap decision about whether or not we like something or someone, our decision is based on years of experience and analysis of past experiences.
So how can we actually USE this insight that Gladwell has given us?
More awareness, as ever, is the key to better clarity
When it comes to using this new insight into our minds in our daily lives, I was particularly taken with the habit of one person in the book who said that he always makes a habit of noting or even writing down the first word that comes into his head when faced with something new.
I also like the idea that we should pay particular attention to the first few seconds of new contact. Sure, we may want to think about different factors and pros and cons of a situation, but it is worth bearing in mind what your initial reaction was.
Rational, conscious thought can also be very effective (as we’ll see in a minute) but often even here we are even more likely to fool ourselves that we are being rational when really we are being swayed by our emotions, by what we want to be true, or by what our employers are paying us to do or think. We are also often swayed in our decisions by what we think we ‘should’ do or think.
BUT… Our unconscious mind also contains a lot of our worst prejudices…
Our unconscious snap decisions, of course, are not always right as Gladwell points out at the end of the book.
We all make decisions and judgments about people, for example, based on their looks, their height and their skin colour, for example. It has even been proven that people are much less likely to sue their doctor (in America mainly, of course) if their doctor was more pleasant to them in consultation - even though the error was the same - than if they were not so pleasant.
Our racial and skin colour prejudices in particular are unconscious so it is a good idea to check any instant judgments we make about people based on their appearances.
Is a short man really any less able to be a good manager? Should we elect Prime Ministers or Presidents because they have a certain charismatic or dependable good looks that our unconscious mind tells us means he ‘looks like a leader’?
Pay attention to the first reactions you have to a new person or situation. It is not always easy to tell whether you should trust your intuition or not - but it may pay to be more aware of what’s going on…
All the best for another week.
